Talking Valentines, Heated Rivalry, and Sexy Fish Scaling with Author Olivia Waite by Julianne Bell Olivia Waite is a Seattle-based romance, sci-fi, and fantasy author, New York Times romance columnist, Jeopardy! champion, and accom plished fiber artist. I was introduced to her via her novel The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, which is not only a beguiling sapphic love story, but also a brilliant ode to the art of science and the science of art. Her latest book, Murder by Memory, a cozy sci-fi mystery set aboard an interstellar passenger liner and the first installment in her Dorothy Gentleman series, came out last March, and the sequel Nobody’s Baby comes out next month. (She’s also currently working on releasing a knitting pattern for the fern shawl that makes a cameo in Murder by Memory.) The Stranger caught up with her about Heated Rivalry, falling in love at karaoke, and how fish-scaling can be surprisingly romantic. How did you first fall in love with the romance genre?I stole my first romance novel from my mom when I was 5. It was a Johanna Lindsey sci-fi romance, so imagine Jupiter Ascending, but with orgasms, and my mom took it away, because nobody wants to explain that kind of thing to a toddler. I picked it up because the cover looked like Star Wars, which also tracks—the whole slave Leia bikini thing was absolutely in the marketing. And I wanted to see how it ended, so as soon as I was old enough to get a library card, I tracked down a copy and managed to finish it. I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s funny, because that’s both the first romance and the first sci-fi novel that I read. As a romance author, what is it like to witness the Heated Rivalry craze erupt into the mainstream right now?The audience reaction has been really gratifying, and then the nonstop bad takes have been deeply irritating. I’ve read the book [series Game Changers by Rachel Reid, from which the show is adapted] before, and I was also a fan of [director Jacob Tierney’s previous show] Letterkenny, so in that slim little Venn diagram of those two things, there were, like, five of us, and we were all so excited. People [were] like, romance adaptations are never good, and I’m like, No, you don’t understand this! Man will point a camera at a dude in a flannel shirt, and you have 18 feelings about it! I think one of the best things about it is that a lot of the conversations, even the difficult ones, have been very productive. People in very closeted industries who can’t come out are finding ways to talk about that with people that they know. What adaptations would you like to see follow in the wake of its success?I want the Alyssa Cole and Beverly Jenkins books, American historical romances specifically set around the experience of Black Americans. Beverly Jenkins has one called Forbidden that is set in a mining town where the machinery never stops whirring, and the hero is a Black man who can pass as white, which means he has access to bank accounts, so he’s helping the Black residents of the town gain credit and build up savings in a way that the bank wouldn’t let them. But in order to live as the authentic Black man he actually is, he has to give that up, and decide whether the job he’s doing is more important than his need to be acknowledged as someone with a family connection, rather than just a good ally. There’s part of himself that he’s had to keep very locked down. It’s gorgeous. There’s an old-timey baseball game, and there’s the heroine carrying her stove as she treks across the desert. It’s the book that made me say, God, fish-scaling is so romantic! And no, it’s not. Beverly Jenkins, what witchcraft is this?! I would love a big, splashy, Yellowstone-level adaptation. What lessons can romance teach us during this difficult time in history?Romance has lessons both positive and negative. I’ve read too much about romance history to pretend it’s all sunshine and rainbows. You get a lot of people saying, well, romance is by women, for women, therefore it’s automatically feminist, and, no. There are terrible and repressive romances being written, and it’s silly to pretend that’s not happening. But the thing that keeps me coming back to this genre as a source of optimism and strength and resilience is that sense that it’s an optimistic genre at its heart—it assumes that the world is improvable, and people can learn. People are worth keeping. They can learn better. Love is possible, and it just might not look like what you intended. What is one romance book you think everyone should read?After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian. It’s set in New York, 1968. It’s about a used bookstore owner and a down-on-his-luck mystery man. It’s also about the protests that are happening in the Civil Rights Movement and labor issues and queer issues in New York, and it’s an entire book list on its own. It is so sad and so good. It feels like somebody wrote you a love letter from 60 years ago to tell you it’s okay and we’ve been through this before. You mentioned over email that you’ve submitted some Stranger valentines in the past; can you tell us about that?They were actually for the man I ended up marrying. I can confirm that I met him singing Peter Gabriel in an Irish dive bar in Fremont. It was this absolute karaoke romance, and this guy gets up and starts screaming, and I go, “There he is. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” We were dating about three months after that, and then we were engaged within the year. Then we spent like two and a half years planning the wedding. For those two and a half years, when I was still in that little Fremont apartment and just about to graduate from grad school and going to this karaoke bar down the corner every Monday night, February would come around, and we would send each other little notes in The Stranger, and it was fantastic. Nobody’s Baby is out March 10 on Tor Publishing. ...read more read less